Quality Assurance has once only been monitoring and evaluation of agent’s calls in order to determine areas of opportunity for improvement and best practices to be fed to the floor. It’s approach was to also “watch” for compliance and ensure all policies and processes of the client are met. It has provided data analysis on each call type, agent, team or even the whole site, to keep customers happy. Coaching and action plans are set in place to improve and agent and keep customers happy. A never ending process.
The Quality Department in every site or program has always been separate from operations. They hear and see things objectively and score each call accordingly. This has also been a part of an agent’s metric in order to proceed to the next level of their career.
Now things have changed as customer’s demands become more volatile and difficult to assess due to time constraints. The industry has now moved into getting Quality Evaluators and Analysts to become more involved in operations. Not only do you expect them on the floor, coaching and assessing, but the pressure comes from being accountable to the metrics, but indirectly. So, what are the changes? What should one Quality Analyst expect?
1. QA Evaluators are now part of a team, either permanently or for a period of time.
To directly affect a team or an agent, with the expected sense of urgency, an evaluator should assess them and able to communicate the areas of improvement effectively to the team manager. They are expected to coach and help in suggesting action plans to improve their call handling and customer service skills at the shortest possible time. With enough sample size and frequency of monitoring, they are able to recommend best practices or even have the authority to remove any agent off the phones.
2. Able to monitor and score objectively, but operational metrics are part of their own metric.
A typical profile of a QA Evaluator is being able to score objectively despite of the similar nuisances of agents they score. By being in a team permanently can possbily damage this objectivity. In order to control this, operational Quality metrics are not included into an evaluator’s apparaisal. This is a risky choice but the path looks like this is where it is going. If this is included, it would be recommendable to evaluate them based on traction. Another option would be setting another metric that would directly affect Quality but not skew their objectivity in scoring.
This is just the beginning of a new Quality Assurance approach to this industry. There will be more as customer satisfaction progresses. Until then…we will need to keep changing and adapting quickly to everyone’s demands.
